Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kevin_Lowe]

Now that Kevin and John have been outed as not having read the Court's judgment with even minimal care, I suppose it comes as no surprise that someone who admits to 'not being a big reader' is in the same boat.

The reason Sollecito washed the knife, rather than disposing of it, is discussed by the Court here:

English translation, Page 375, last paragraph.

It is not 'rational' to dismiss the Court's reasoning as 'garbage' without first bothering to read it.

Treehorn! Nice to see you back. I am sure that a detailed response to my last post to you will be forthcoming.

Now on to this new topic you've started (or rather rebooted, it's an old and flat mole).

Actually as I recall we were just mocking that particularly stupid argument a minute ago.

Unless Raffaele Sollecito's landlord was in the habit of conducting weekly knife inspections (unlikely) and Raffaele was dumb enough to think that an absent knife was more suspicious than an actual murder weapon in police hands (possible but implausible) and Raffaele wasn't bright enough to realise that the knife in question was inventoried as "large knife" and hence eminently replaceable (possible but implausible) then this might make sense...

...except that we can only have this discussion if we've already accepted that the knife was used in the first place (improbable since it is at best compatible with only one of the three wounds, and the wound it is compatible with is also compatible with the knife that inflicted the other two), and already accepted that Amanda carried a kitchen knife around in her bag for self-defence (which Massei describes as "probable" with absolutely no justification and in defiance of common sense).

The claim that the knife was used in the murder is unsupported.

The claim that Amanda carried the knife around with her is unsupported and highly implausible to boot.

The fact that if these implausible things had happened it would also be more rational and indeed in my view more likely that they just would have disposed of the hypothetical murder knife along with the hypothetical murder clothes and shoes is just the icing of further improbability on the cake of ludicrous post hoc rationalisation.

(Is it a good time to bring up once again that despite a thorough inventory of the accused's wardrobes the police were never able to show that a single item of clothing or shoe had gone missing from either of them? It's funny how the police never find any hard evidence incriminating those two except in the privacy of their own DNA labs using non-standard procedures. I guess it proves what master moppers, stage-managers and all-around cleaner-uppers those two are).

In any case, I look forward to your response to the outstanding issues of whether you were completely wrong in claiming that Amanda and Rudy smoked marijuana together several times, whether you attempted to defend this claim with citations that did not back it up, how someone who claims to be a lawyer can get the maxim "never ask a question you do not know the answer to" so badly wrong twice, what your theory of the crime is and what non-unique subset of the evidence would be sufficient to convince you that Amanda Knox's guilt is >50% probable.

 

[RWVBWL]

<snip>
2. Laboratories are very busy and couldn't possibly accommodate the convenience of all observers eg, to manage workload and resources not all tests are necessarily run every day.
<snip>

Greetings BucketofTea,
I have a question for you:
With a busy laboratory to work in, what the heck was Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni doing collecting the evidence too?

Forgive me if I am wrong, but didn't she do this on more than 1 occasion?

Thanks for any reply, it helps me to formulate my own opinion regarding how Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox were convicted.
Take it easy, RWVBWL

PS-Folks, don't you think that what Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni did by collecting and analyzing evidence might be a conflict of interest?

Being a simple kinda guy, I put it this way:
Say that you get pulled over for a moving violation by Police Officer Stefonono. The officer says that you were doing 45 in a 35 zone and writes a ticket. But you had checked your speedometer a moment before the flashing lights caught you attention, you were doing 35. You feel the officer made a mistake. So you show up to court to contest the ticket, and guess who is sitting behind the bench, Judge Stefonono.
Yikes...

 

[komponisto]

I highly doubt that - one has all the evidence and the other has the tabloids to read - did Hendry travel to Purgia and was he given exclusive rights to all the required evidence

I don't know where "Purgia" is, but in any event all you had to do was read the linked page:

Ron was given access to hundreds of photos and several hours of video taken at the Meredith Kercher murder scene.

And why does this idea persist that Micheli, Massei believe what they do because of information not in the public record? That's bull-oney; the whole point of these "motivation documents" is to make their reasoning public.

Judges sometimes err. That's what happened here, and they've been called on it. Trying to resist facing this fact by saying "oh no, they can't simply be wrong, they must know secret information that you don't" is transparently silly.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

The negative TMB test

Not at all. Washing with water and friction you could remove all the organic components and diminish the Fe to the point that it's indistinguishable from the ferrous content of the blade. All that scouring might in fact be what forced particulate (not 4 random cells, but a tiny piece of tissue; made up of 4 or more cells) matter into a deformity on the blade's surface.

Does that help?

bucketoftea,

You are making an unsupportable claim about the DNA, that it came from particulate tissue from a certain part of the blade. There was no determination of what sort of tissue gave rise to the DNA. Did Dr. Stefanoni swab only the deformity? That’s virtually impossible. You seem to be making a claim about how the blade was cleaned without having any actual evidence. And you are making a claim that some cells are removed more easily than others.

More importantly, you are making claims about TMB that don’t make sense. If TMB were sensitive to the iron in the blade, then the whole blade would test strongly positive. That is not what was observed. Here is what Johnson and Hampikian say: “A highly sensitive chemical test for blood was negative, and it is unlikely that all chemically detectable traces of blood could be removed while retaining sufficient cells to produce a DNA profile consistent with the victim.”

post script
I noticed that you ignored one of my messages entirely, as well as a question posed in another: "If the knife were disassembled and found not to have blood, what would you conclude?"

 

[RWVBWL]

<snip>PSS-Guys sometimes talk of their conquests, for I hear it a lot from the bro's.
Some guys I know are pretty legendary around my neck of the woods.
With that in mind, I wonder if Rudy knew of this too? Maybe he heard Giacomo tell of this recent conquest, and he went over there with the intent to rape instead of rob. Maybe that's why he did not take much. For all anyone knows, Rudy could have had a nylon stocking mask on which covered his face when he entered the gals apartment that night, with the intent to commit a rape. Don't many victims know the rapist?
Hmmm, I wonder...

WOW. That is actually possible.

Hi Mary H,
Didn't Rudy Guede say that he went over to Meredith Kercher's apartment because he had a date? Was he looking for sex?

I am starting to wonder if this whole case is a rape gone wrong, not a burglary gone wrong which turned into a sexual assault...

A question for anyone.
Dan O. posted this photograph:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6718632#post6718632

and Draca posted this photograph:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=181350768556069&set=a.124466634244483.15396.106344459390034

Is that Laura's underwear drawer that is open?
Was he rifling thru her panty drawer?
I've heard of guys doin' that before...

Did Rudy Guede break-in to rape either Meredith or Amanda?
And the rape went horribly wrong, and it became a murder?
Hmmm, I still wonder alot...
RWVBWL

 

[Mary_H]

Hi Mary H,
Didn't Rudy Guede say that he went over to Meredith Kercher's apartment because he had a date? Was he looking for sex?

I am starting to wonder if this whole case is a rape gone wrong, not a burglary gone wrong which turned into a sexual assault...

A question for anyone.
Dan O. posted this photograph:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6718632#post6718632

and Draca posted this photograph:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=181350768556069&set=a.124466634244483.15396.106344459390034

Is that Laura's underwear drawer that is open?
Was he rifling thru her panty drawer?
I've heard of guys doin' that before...

Did Rudy Guede break-in to rape either Meredith or Amanda?
And the rape went horribly wrong, and it became a murder?
Hmmm, I still wonder alot...
RWVBWL

I think it's a reasonable guess, RW. Rudy claimed he had a date with Meredith. I don't believe that, but it's possible he was eager to "get with" her. He might have seen her coming home and figured it was his opportunity to give that a try. He talks his way in when she goes in (to use the bathroom?), then goes in her room hoping she will agree to sex.

 

[moodstream]

removed - issue already addressed

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Greetings BucketofTea,
I have a question for you:
With a busy laboratory to work in, what the heck was Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni doing collecting the evidence too?

It's cause for serious concern.

A standard pro-guilt trope is to argue that Amanda Knox and Raffaele must be guilty because anything else would require a conspiracy! (dunn dunn DUNN!).

I happen to think they are wrong that it requires a conspiracy in the pejorative sense, rather than in the more mundane sense of multiple people getting together to break the law. A conspiracy theory is a very different beast to a conspiracy, although guilters try to equivocate between the two as much as they possibly can.

However they're a little bit right, to the extent that it is a significant safeguard against wrongdoing to split up a job so that no one person can get up to too much mischief. You want to avoid situations where we essentially we have to take a single person's word for what happened.

That's why it's of great concern that Stefanoni took it into her head to fold the entire evidence-gathering and analysis procedure into her own job description. It's essentially saying "How about we just get rid of all those pesky safeguards against falsification, and you just trust me?". So she goes to the house herself, gathers evidence herself, analyses it herself and presents the results herself, (except for the vital electronic files, which she keeps to herself) and hey presto, the vital evidence her boss needs appears!

It's a bit like a magician who takes pains to make sure you don't shuffle their deck before they do a trick, and takes pains to make sure you don't examine the deck afterwards. It makes one suspicious.

 

[Mary_H]

Now that Kevin and John have been outed as not having read the Court's judgment with even minimal care, I suppose it comes as no surprise that someone who admits to 'not being a big reader' is in the same boat.

The reason Sollecito washed the knife, rather than disposing of it, is discussed by the Court here:

English translation, Page 375, last paragraph.

It is not 'rational' to dismiss the Court's reasoning as 'garbage' without first bothering to read it.

Did someone say the court's reasoning was garbage? I mean, it is, but I don't think anyone has made that claim lately. And I agree that it would not be rational to dismiss the court's reasoning without having read it. It is equally irrational, however, to take the court's reasoning at face value without analyzing it. Especially for a lawyer.

Massei's big eighth-grade logic project on this subject is as astute as so many of his others:

"This knife, which attracted the attention of Inspector Finzi during the search in Raffaele Sollecito’s house such that it was taken, unlike the other knives that were in the same drawer, must have presented itself as different from the others, with [403] its own individuality with respect to the other knives present in the Corso Garibaldi house. The owner of this house, were this knife not to be found in the Corso Garibaldi house, would have been able to remember its presence and note the absence of this utensil, and this circumstance would have been able to constitute a trace, an investigative hypothesis upon which Raffaele Sollecito may have been called in to supply an explanation for."

Meanwhile, here is the knife-finder's day in court:

"Armando Finzi, an assistant in the Perugia police department's organized crimes unit, first discovered the knife in Sollecito's kitchen drawer. He said the first thing he noticed upon entering the place was a "strong smell of bleach." He opened the drawer and saw "very shiny and clean" knife lying on top of the silverware tray.

"It was the first knife I saw," he said. When pressed on cross-examination, said his "investigative intuition" led him to believe it was the murder weapon because it was compatible with the wound as it had been described to him. With gloved hands, he placed the knife in a new police envelope, taped it shut with Scotch tape, then placed it inside a folder, he said. There were smaller and bigger knives in the drawer, but no others were taken into evidence from the kitchen, he said. A small knife was taken into evidence from Sollecito's bedroom, along with other items."

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/401876_Knoxvogt01.html

For Judge Massei's logic about the knife's distinguishing characteristics to be valid, there would have to have been some potential for Raffaele's landlord inspecting the apartment and saying, "Now, where is that knife -- the shiny and clean one that lies on top of the others? I see bigger knives and smaller knives, but I don't see that one. Boy, that Raffaele Sollecito has some serious explaining to do."

 

[treehorn]

Micheli is a bureaucrat with interests to tend. Hendry and Torre are forensic experts.

Blind faith in the authorities may help you sleep better at night, but it will also lead you to believe things that aren't true.

You're not really under the impression that "forensic experts" are saintly creatures without "interests" of their own, are you?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I highly doubt that - one has all the evidence and the other has the tabloids to read - did Hendry travel to Purgia and was he given exclusive rights to all the required evidence - I don't think so, the Judge was. How could anyone even remotely argue this?

A great many people have indeed formed their opinion of this case from tabloid coverage, but Hendry is not one of them. His reconstruction is based on a meticulous examination of the crime scene photos and video.

 

[treehorn]

For Judge Massei's logic about the knife's distinguishing characteristics to be valid, there would have to have been some potential for Raffaele's landlord inspecting the apartment and saying, "Now, where is that knife -- the shiny and clean one that lies on top of the others?" I see bigger knives and smaller knives, but I don't see that one. Boy, that Raffaele Sollecito has some serious explaining to do."

I used to think the "Friends of Amanda" group had something with that point (of all the knives in the drawer, they just happened to pick the 'magic' one).

Then I saw the photo:

A great big, bad** butcher knife lying across the top of a tray that held the usual assortment of small table knives, spoons, and forks.

If you were a police officer investigating Sollecito's kitchen in the wake of a homicide-by-knife, you'd have to be a FOOL not to select that big, bad shiny knife for testing: It SCREAMED out for it.

For the same reason (big, bad, shiny atop a tray of small, harmless tableware), it would have caught the landlord's attention if it had been missing.

The risk that, upon check out, the landlord would notice a new butcher knife had replaced the original may have been minimal, but not zero.

Similarly, the act of buying a new butcher knife to replace the old one would entail a certain amount of risk as well: A shop keeper or transaction record could come back to haunt you.


PS Have you really not seen that photo, Mary?

You can find it on PMF.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You're not really under the impression that "forensic experts" are saintly creatures without "interests" of their own, are you?

You have a few unanswered questions. I assume you can scroll up but I'm happy to cut and paste for you if it turns out to be helpful.

On this new tangent, I am very sure nobody ever asserted that ""forensic experts" are saintly creatures without "interests" of their own", or even implied it, or even implied anything like it.

The specific challenge was to explain why one might choose to believe Hendry, for example, might be more reliable than Micheli at ascertaining matters of fact pertaining to the case. The explanation is that this is his field of expertise... but of course the question was misguided in the first place.

Rationalists don't seek an authority to kowtow to, and spend their time arguing over whose authority is more worthy. They look to the facts. I think Hendry's presentation and explanation of the facts is excellent, far better than that of Massei, for example.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I used to think the "Friends of Amanda" group had something with that point (of all the knives in the drawer, they just happened to pick the 'magic' one).

Then I saw the photo:

A great big, bad** butcher knife lying across the top of a tray that held the usual assortment of small table knives, spoons, and forks.

You have a few unanswered questions. I assume you can scroll up but I'm happy to cut and paste for you if it turns out to be helpful. Would that help you out?

On this new tangent, I agree completely that the alleged murder weapon sticks out like a sore thumb in Raffaele Sollecito's cutlery drawer, so the question "How did they pick it out of the cutlery drawer?" is not a good one to ask.

However the question "How did they pick it out of all the potential weapons in both houses?" is a little more troubling. As the much-maligned but professionally expert Steve Moore pointed out, in the USA in a similar case everything capable of punching a hole in a piece of paper in the murder house would have been bagged, tagged and taken off for testing. This wasn't done.

Instead the police left any number of potential murder weapons lying around at the scene of the crime, and made themselves busy bagging and tagging all the knives at Raffaele's place, which they then tested so assiduously that Stefanoni was allegedly scraping picogram traces out of an alleged flaw in the blade so imperceptible that nobody could see it in court.

A mote it is, to trouble the mind's eye. It looks an awful lot like a case of privileging a highly unlikely hypothesis, rather than gathering evidence impartially and then seeing what hypothesis falls out of the evidence. That's the kind of irrational thinking that leads to bad outcomes.

So do you need me to copy and paste those questions for you? Or do you need an actual hyperlink?

 

[komponisto]

Rationalists don't seek an authority to kowtow to, and spend their time arguing over whose authority is more worthy. They look to the facts.

Relevant Less Wrong post (linked to previously, but very relevant here): Argument Screens Off Authority

Summary: authority is useful if you can't evaluate the arguments yourself. But if you can, good arguments trump good authority, because good arguments are the only reason authority can be good in the first place.

 

[Dan O.]

A question for anyone.
Dan O. posted this photograph:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6718632#post6718632

and Draca posted this photograph:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=181350768556069&set=a.124466634244483.15396.106344459390034

Is that Laura's underwear drawer that is open?
Was he rifling thru her panty drawer?

Rudy said that Meredith kept her rent money in her underwear drawer. Rudy said that Meredith then showed him where Amanda kept her rent money but it wasn't there. If Rudy is not telling the truth, I suspect that he rifled through all the girls drawers and looked under their mattresses looking for that cash. Notice how Meredith's mattress is not centered on the frame. You can see the same to a lesser extent with Laura's. Filomena's bed spread is also disturbed at the head end but Filomena is not as tidy as Laura so this isn't as strong. Amanda's room is neater but the bed is unmade so it doesn't show evidence of being lifted.

 

[Mary_H]

I used to think the "Friends of Amanda" group had something with that point (of all the knives in the drawer, they just happened to pick the 'magic' one).

Then I saw the photo:

A great big, bad** butcher knife lying across the top of a tray that held the usual assortment of small table knives, spoons, and forks.

If you were a police officer investigating Sollecito's kitchen in the wake of a homicide-by-knife, you'd have to be a FOOL not to select that big, bad shiny knife for testing: It SCREAMED out for it.

For the same reason (big, bad, shiny atop a tray of small, harmless tableware), it would have caught the landlord's attention if it had been missing.

The risk that, upon check out, the landlord would notice a new butcher knife had replaced the original may have been minimal, but not zero.

Similarly, the act of buying a new butcher knife to replace the old one would entail a certain amount of risk as well: A shop keeper or transaction record could come back to haunt you.


PS Have you really not seen that photo, Mary?

You can find it on PMF.

I'm afraid that if you want to make a claim about the silverware drawer, you are going to have to be the one to provide a photo of the silverware drawer.

You have ignored my point about the judge's logic. Massei says the knife "must have presented itself as different from the others," but all Finzi's testimony says is that it was "shiny and clean" and "lay on top." Finzi reportedly also said there were smaller and bigger knives in the drawer, so we really can't conclude from its size that this particular knife was anything special.

Under these circumstances, don't you find Massei's reasoning weak? If you were representing the defendants, wouldn't you expect the judge to specify exactly HOW the knife differed from the others, instead of settling for his assumption that it did? How do we know his conclusion doesn't follow from an invalid premise?

 

[komponisto]

Massei's big eighth-grade logic project on this subject is as astute as so many of his others:

"This knife, which attracted the attention of Inspector Finzi during the search in Raffaele Sollecito’s house such that it was taken, unlike the other knives that were in the same drawer, must have presented itself as different from the others, with [403] its own individuality with respect to the other knives present in the Corso Garibaldi house. The owner of this house, were this knife not to be found in the Corso Garibaldi house, would have been able to remember its presence and note the absence of this utensil, and this circumstance would have been able to constitute a trace, an investigative hypothesis upon which Raffaele Sollecito may have been called in to supply an explanation for."

This passage rivals the one about how Knox and Sollecito must have been up to something that night because they slept in until 10 am in its sheer self-parodying value, and as a candidate for the locus classicus of Massei and Cristiani's jaw-dropping prejudice against the defendants.

 

[Mary_H]

This passage rivals the one about how Knox and Sollecito must have been up to something that night because they slept in until 10 am in its sheer self-parodying value, and as a candidate for the locus classicus of Massei and Cristiani's jaw-dropping prejudice against the defendants.

Don't forget about the one in which the judge concludes that Nara Capezzalli surely would not have claimed she heard a scream unless she actually had heard one.

 

[komponisto]

Don't forget about the one in which the judge concludes that Nara Capezzalli surely would not have claimed she heard a scream unless she actually had heard one.

....or the one where they use Amanda's "capacious purse" as a reason to suspect that she was carrying around the kitchen knife (on the advice of Raffaele)....